


37C

by pseudocitrus



Category: Tokyo Ghoul, Tokyo Ghoul:re
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Mafia AU, Semi-PWP
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-14 10:24:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9176836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pseudocitrus/pseuds/pseudocitrus
Summary: She’d almost punched him into the bar, the first time he’d visited. It was nerves. She’d accepted that ghouls of certain groups she’d rather not entertain were starting to use :re as a kind of sanctuary, butThe One-Eyed Kingwas just a little too far.





	

**Author's Note:**

> a small semi-pwp touken mafia au! NOT related to [my previous one](http://pseudocitrus.tumblr.com/post/154743879469/nicholaschka-touka-x-kaneki), but ALSO heavily inspired by [paka-senpai’s mafia au](http://paa-kaa.tumblr.com/post/118792419683/mafia-au-ft-shironeki-this-time-he-looks-like) :’)
> 
> hope you're having a good new year thus far~~~

The bell on the door rings.

“Welcome,” Touka starts, and stops, with a stab. _A White Suit_ —

No. No. A moment later, she grits her teeth, irritated and embarrassed by her panic.

The figure raises a gloved hand, hooks it on their mask, and pulls it down over their chin. The expression revealed there is a wry smile.

“Hello, Touka-chan.”

:::

 

The Nameless One-Eyed King.

She’d almost punched him into the bar, the first time he’d visited. It was nerves. She’d accepted that ghouls of certain groups she’d rather not entertain were starting to use :re as a kind of sanctuary, but _The One-Eyed King_  was just a little too far. Her heart thrummed in her chest like a sparrow with a broken wing.

Power is power. She isn’t eager to witness his prowess firsthand — the monstrous kagune, the trembling red eye. She couldn’t do anything but thrash and wriggle and peck uselessly beneath his thumb, and he knew it.

Still, their first meetings were tense. He guessed, accurately, that the manager of :re would have an assortment of valuable rumors stockpiled from ghouls drunk with some of the only wine in the city they can drink. But unspooling them from her was another matter.

It had taken a while. Patience, and firmness, and a soft smile that had caught her off guard, one that hadn’t even been aimed at her but at a book he’d closed and tucked away before opening her door with his expression once more glazed stoically. They came to trade secrets like money, conversed over swirling glasses or steaming mugs. Ghoul factions. Dove missions. Good books. And Touka, who for a long time had no reason to come down from her well-balanced solitude, found herself leaning in to hear the sound of his hushed voice.

_“You want…my name?”_

“What’s with the disguise?” Touka asks, retrieving a corked bottle from beneath the bar. “The robe wasn’t weird enough for you?”

“You think it’s weird?”

He looks down at himself, arms slightly spread. He starts to scratch his head, and then stops, and leans around her to check the mirror behind the bar, confirming his hair is still slicked back in place. Touka has a sudden urge to reach out and muss it, fervently.

He sits, close enough so that she could do it, if she dared. She pours him a glass as he starts to explain himself. Clowns. Doves. Goats. World peace.

Terrifying or not, the One-Eyed King is a ridiculous idealist.

And still, she can’t bring herself to give him a bill.

“Be safe,” she says, instead, and the air changes. He looks up at her with his single bare eye, the iris as red as a flower. She quickly reaches to take his glass so she can turn away from him, and at the same moment he reaches for the glass to hand it to her, and the result is that their hands touch, just barely, but with a strange static that buds at her fingertips and unfurls messily into her ribcage.

There’s a moment when their hands remain that way. Touching.

Then Touka takes the glass and turns away. When she looks back, the King is pulling the mask over his face. The teeth of it flare with effortless aggression. But his gaze is downcast.

“Come back again soon,” Touka finds herself saying. “Kaneki.”

“I will,” he says.

Then he leaves.

:::

 

It’s the power. That’s all it is.

She admires it, is all. And wants it, sure, yes, but not in _that_  way, only in the same way everyone wants it, to walk in the daylight, to eat, to even sleep without a single worry about anything besides something idyllic, like whether the next day’s classes will be interesting or not.

That’s all it is. The things that have passed between them, the rumors and the quiet conversations, the sped-up pace of her heart that had quieted when she learned him and then suddenly sped up again when she knew him better, the French press she keeps beneath the bar, the keychain in the left pocket of her apron, the way his eyes always catch on her when he thinks she isn’t looking, the flash of nape of his neck that she sees sometimes when he is on his way out, the dreams that she has sometimes, both in the night and in the day, when they are together but the bar isn’t between them —

It’s the power.

That’s all it is.

:::

 

The night passes. The day passes. Night comes, again.

What happened?

Rumors always fall into her lap without her lifting a finger, but, for the first time, she finds herself straining to hear them.

_What happened?_

In the absence of information, her mind starts to make it up.

_It was a failure. He couldn’t find it, the vial he was looking for. Instead, they captured him again, instead, he never even made it, instead, the Doves all took aim at once and not even he could block it, his spine shattered and when it mended they just shattered it again and again —_

She makes fists on the counter, drills a knuckle in, blinks rapidly, pours herself a glass. The bar is empty, still empty. Whatever happened, everyone is still too afraid of it to come in, or else still licking their wounds.

Wildly, she thinks, _If I had known that he wouldn’t actually come back, I would have —_

But she can’t bring herself to even think it.

:::

 

She can’t bear it, suddenly. Every time she turns, she imagines seeing pale hair in her periphery, or the whisk of an embroidered robe. She pulls on a coat, turns the sign to _Closed,_ and leaves.

Outside, it’s snowing, faintly. This is probably the real reason no one is coming by, she tells herself. The snow makes it so that the city is even quieter than she has been imagining it.

_If I had known he wouldn’t actually come back, I would have…_

Stupid. Power isn’t everything after all. It’s nothing. Not even power can prevent the inevitability of parting.

_You’re overreacting._

She can’t help it.

_You just don’t know. Calm down. You just don’t know what happened._

But she never really knew either, what happened to her father, or her mother. That never soothed her.

She walks. After a while she looks up, and makes herself blink slowly. Snow falls onto her face, beads on her eyelashes and cheeks. She opens her mouth and imagines it’s something else, like maybe powdered sugar. She’s like that for a block or so, walking back to a college dorm that doesn’t exist, trying to lose herself in the taste of a life she doesn’t have, and for that reason doesn’t notice a car is following her until she stops, and hears it crunch to a halt as well.

She doesn’t move.

It doesn’t, either.

She takes a heavy breath. Releases it in a thick cloud. She waits, and then turns to eye it, warningly. The passenger windows are tinted so dark that they are completely opaque, and she can’t make out the driver, except that it’s a man, and she starts, with a stab. She recognizes that face, from a photo, it’s a Dove, it’s the partner of the White —

One of the back doors opens and she takes off. But before she can get far, she hears a voice.

“Touka-chan!”

:::

 

Kaneki.

She grits her teeth, furious, and humiliated by her relief. Kaneki is getting out of the car, Kaneki is standing in the snow, alive, and _whole_. Suddenly it seems like it’s been years since he’s called her that, and all it takes is a moment, for her to be unable to help herself.

She races back. She only partially understands what it is that she’s doing, only knows it for certain when he straightens and then spreads his arms, to receive her. Her arms wrap around his back; her face buries into his chest.

:::

 

_“Touka-chan.”_

It started almost mockingly, as if she was a child, or a small creature.

_“Touka-chan.”_

At some point, though she isn’t sure when, it became something different. Something as casual as if it were her real nickname, a moniker well-worn from some other time that never actually existed, some other story where the bastard son of a crime syndicate and a orphan with a single torn dress could have actually been friends.

Or maybe even a story where the leader of a crime syndicate and the manager of a small bar could actually be —

“Touka-chan,” Kaneki says softly, and Touka’s voice, when she reclaims it, is shaking.

“What happened to you?” she demands. “I was waiting.”

But he’s speaking simultaneously. “What happened to you? The bar was closed.”

His hair is back to normal, but he looks exhausted. He has only his usual outfit again, the eyepatch, and the suit and the robe. He exited the car but looks like he can barely hold himself up to greet her. Touka starts a dozen angry cries and swallows each. The effort, especially after so long wrestling with her own thoughts, exhausts her. In the end what comes out is the plain, unadorned truth.

“I was worrying about you.”

An expression crosses his face. He is not too easy to read; sometimes it feels like there are at least half a dozen of him, stuffed into one body. But the look there is one that she understands.

 _I can’t,_ she thinks. _I can’t._

This would be too much a breach. This would be too close a wound. Power is power is power, and it’s opposite is exactly this kind of vulnerability. Furthermore, she’s heard every rumor in this city. She knows how they all end.

If she’d only known that he wouldn’t come back, she would have —

But he did.

:::

 

One last effort.

She starts to push herself away, but he anticipates it, maybe; his gloved hand grasps hers, right there in public, and the knot made of their intertwined fingers reels her into place. Without her steady counter between them, they are so, so close.

The car is still running. The door is still open. The glass is wet with melted snow. The interior looks clean, plush, warm. Outside, the quiet of the snow seems abruptly to curtain an audience watching her as intently as Kaneki is now.

“I’ll take you back to :re,” Kaneki murmurs, and Touka takes a breath, and uses it to say, “Yes.”

:::

 

They part, for just a little.

Kaneki holds the door even wider for her, and shuts it after she tugs in her skirt. It’s a fancy car, with a fancy smell, both of which match the King’s pedigree, the official one, not the one that he dons with his mask and machinations.

The seats are smooth, and wide, and when Kaneki gets in and closes the door she remembers, how the windows had been so opaque they were like walls, no one can see them in here except the driver who is even now regarding them stoically in the rearview mirror, and without further word, without even a glance in his direction, Kaneki reaches for a button that rolls up a partition that isolates them into a space filled only with their bodies, their air, their heat.

:::

 

It’s the power.

That’s all it is.

No creature alive could resist this, the One-Eyed King raising a hand to their face, grazing a cheek with a knuckle gloved by material softer than anything she can name. It leaves her breathless, his sheer ability. He can go to the heart of the Doves’ nest, and all the way down to the pit of Cochlea, and still find his way back, to her.

Power. She’s sure it’s for want of _that_ that she opens her mouth, and leans toward him. She meets his lips with a hunger whose longing she can’t suppress, and tries to taste it in him, what it must be like to be able to have anything you want. This close, he smells less like a ghoul and more like something that makes her mouth water, like — like invincibility — like safety, like freedom. Like satiation.

But at her contact his body gives a strange shiver, almost a rattle, like an almost-empty bottle. He kisses her back, firm, as if it’s her that has something that he wants; his tongue slips against hers, shy, and then sharp. He nips. He reaches.

She’s pressed against the window; she hardly notices. He kisses her cheek, her chin, he unwinds her scarf and tastes the cold and then too-heated stretch of her throat, and it would seem maybe that he was instigating this, with all his privileged strength, but Touka’s fingers are digging into his hair, mussing it, tugging it, almost dislodging the straps of the eyepatch. Their bodies are aligning, sort of. The weight of him has something of the flavor she was searching for. She hears herself make a noise, a wordless one that comes from her throat, and another, which turns out to be the sound of her heels being kicked off and landing on the floor of the car. The driver hears it, maybe, because when :re passes outside the window, he continues driving, and Touka continues sighing, and Kaneki continues undoing the buttons of her shirt, one by one.

The gloves are cold, a little — her body furls, impulsively, when he slips them beneath her bra — but he squeezes and her body heats anyway, quickly, immediately. She covers her mouth, because the worst thing would be to startle the driver and get pulled out half-naked from a crashed wreck, or something, but Kaneki takes her hand’s finger into his mouth, cradles and sucks it indulgently in his warm mouth, and she stops caring, quickly, immediately.

Skin. She wants skin. She’s familiar with desiring flesh and this is almost, almost the same. Her urgency, at least, is exact. She pushes the robe off him, pushes him until he’s sitting up, she starts to work at his buttons and he stiffens, but for just a moment. He watches her as each undone button increases the exposure of his chest. She does the same thing to him as he did to her, sort of, feels his muscle with her fingertips and nails, smooths across his nipples, and is rewarded by a flush, the once-Centipede ex-Dove One-Eyed King, _flushing._

“Touka-chan,” he groans, “p-please,” and, maybe because it’s undoubtedly him that’s much stronger than her, maybe because it’s him that has the higher rating on the Dove’s scale, the sound of that tortured voice, _begging_ her, sets something alight in her belly.

Fancy car or not, the space is still limited enough that extricating themselves from the obstacle of their clothing is difficult. They twist, and writhe, and kick, and rip; a button flies off somewhere, probably never again to see the light of day; Touka’s tights rip, slightly at first, and then a lot, with Kaneki’s encouraging hand. He cups and strokes her and Touka sheds even more on top of him, rising and falling in his lap as everything scatters, everywhere, leaving most of her body bare to his grasp while she strokes, carefully, the long scar across his belly, and lower, beneath the hem of his unbelted, unzipped slacks.

It’s the power. She holds him, firmly, watches him tremble, watches his head fall back, watches his Adam’s apple bob wildly. His fingers feel her, and he is either unaware or uncaring that his gloves are growing very wet. She closes her eyes and waits until he can fit two of them inside her, waits until she can’t wait anymore, and then kneels above him, and lowers, lowers, lowers.

They both breathe, hard. It seems impossible to keep ignoring now that she had come to dream often of a moment like this one, when she’d have him inside her, and yet there was no way she actually imagined this, the steamed windows, the static zipping up her spine, the swell of feelings that accompany his every centimeter inside her. Inside the car it’s close quarters and still somehow not close enough. Kaneki’s breath is ragged on her shoulders.

“Are…are you…cold?”

“H…huh?”

He kisses her shoulder, with a kind of tenderness that the One-Eyed King shouldn’t really have, probably. The contact renews a patch of goosebumps on her body, and she understands him, but before she can correct him, he is fumbling for the robe again, and raising it, and draping it, over her shoulders. It’s silken on her, and she does feel even warmer, though she isn’t sure whether it’s the material or the faint and too-delicious scent of him on it or the fact that it enfolds them into an even smaller space, where for him, there is only her.

She moves. She rolls back and forth across him, first, feels him gasp and flex inside of her, feels him dig his fingers into her thighs, and then she braces herself on the back of the seat, and starts to thrust on him in earnest, knowing that too strong a rhythm will upset the car’s driving and, at that particular moment, unable to stop herself from pursuing it anyway. He helps her, gripping her ass, supporting her, hips moving in unison — their foreheads mash, and slide, sheened in sweat — her nails tear the cushion, her voice cries his name.

It feels good. It’s better than having her fill, and even when she thinks she might burst with it, she continues moving against him, having him, and having him, until all at once she can’t control any part of her, until her body seizes and flares and acts, helplessly — squeezing him, spasming, sinking teeth in a portion of his shoulder that is as sweet as his wince and moan. She licks her lips, and gazes. He looks as dazed as she feels; his chest is heaving, spent.

That’s all it is. But an instant later, she’s embarrassed, by what she wanted. What she took. The complete exposure of her desire here, in a place where it can’t be hidden, exposes too, the kind of hunger that’s a shame for any ghoul to admit. She licks her lips and hopes they’re clean. Her hands rest on him, abruptly unsure.

An expression crosses his face. He caresses her. His gloves trace her spine. When his hands reach the spot between her shoulder blades, he pushes, softly, and turns his head. The wound she made glistens.

Outside, :re passes by, again. Touka doesn’t notice. Her eyes are wide, and then shut. She opens her mouth, and leans toward him.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! :')


End file.
